


Sorrow, My Heart

by vifetoile



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Grief, Maybe - Freeform, mother-daughter bond, possible reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 20:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5062528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vifetoile/pseuds/vifetoile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arielle, mother of Lirael, has a lot of thoughts, out on the ice. Precious little good they do her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrow, My Heart

Arielle paced back and forth on the shore of a frozen sea. She was alone.   
By the heaviness of her eyes it was past midnight, but the sun was already appearing above the horizon again, brightening the ice around her.   
Her hand flew again and again to the Charter mark on her forehead. It steadied her, to reach into the Charter. The magic here, so close to the Pole, changed and grew un-steady. She had an idea that it was the same kind of dissolution that happened south of the Wall; she had an idea that a new magic might thrive on the far side of the Pole, far beyond the northern boundary of the Old Kingdom. She had an idea…  
She had a lot of ideas. Precious little good they did her, up here.   
*  
Even in the Glacier she had never known cold like this. She pumped her legs back and forth as she walked, bowing her head against the wind. The wind made her think of her daughter. But then, so did the cry of a seagull, the barbarian lullabies she heard after evening meal, the stray syllables of the foreign tongue around her. Lirael was never far from her mind, or her heart.

Let’s see. In the Children’s Quarter, Lirael would be sleeping even now, her dark hair fanning onto the pillow around her, and onto her face, as she lay curled up on her side. If Arielle were there, she could brush the hair out of her face – and bend down to kiss her on the ear –   
Arielle dug into her furs and pulled out a battered moonstone on a chain. She had wrenched it out of her silver circlet before she’d left. She stared into the stone. She prayed and prayed for the vision, the one vision of the one future that she wanted –   
But the moonstone’s surface remained opaque. Arielle wasted her voice, praying to a Charter that paid her no heed.   
*  
Arielle had many ideas. Most of them she wrote down in the leatherbound notebook she’d won by bartering. Paper was scarce up here, and so she wrote it in a tiny shorthand that abbreviated everything. It had dual advantages of making her writing illegible to the tribesmen she lived with, and of making them believe she had dangerous magic bound in these pages. They thought of her as almost another kind of hunter, so intent was she on capturing and taming the world around her with words. If any Clayr had looked at the pages, they would have thought she was insane. But Arielle had made her peace with that. She’d known she was insane ever since she took Finder and sailed south, alone, to Abhorsen’s House.   
Besides, her notes had meticulous organization. She had symbols to distinguish whether a passage concerned her memories, her Sight, her daughter, the Charter, the Abhorsen, and the Clayr. She had copied out the old song about the Long Ago, and how the Seven wove the Charter – and she had an idea of the Seven Bright Shiners arrayed in a ring, seven women weaving at a vast loom with seven sides. They chatted like sisters, like Clayr, as they wove and wove, and the world sat within their threads.   
But at other times Arielle had the idea that one of the Seven wept, that her threads of the Charter were stained with tears, long before the weaving was done. And Arielle was glad there was no one to read over her shoulder and say “That’s preposterous!”, because somehow she felt that this Weeper was reincarnated in her Lirael.  
That was why her Sight had given her so many visions of Lirael weeping – weeping on birthdays, weeping as she was led, blindfolded, into the Observatory, weeping as she fought to save and couldn’t save so many innocent lives. Arielle began to weep herself, as she remembered these visions. It seemed like every joy Lirael would ever know would only exist to be taken away, to make room for a new sorrow. Sorrowful, the forlorn outcast, weeping black-haired Lirael. And she must weep, for the Charter needed its Weeper.   
Arielle crouched down on the snow as the sun brightened the world around her, and the grey waves of the sea turned translucent. Her tears threatened to freeze on her cheeks, so she wiped them away with her sleeve. She noticed that her hair, caught on the fur at her elbow, was grown knotty and tangled. She felt the bones of her face. She’d lost much weight on the ice, as she ate and slept little.   
Why, Lirael would not even recognize her if she met her. They would be always apart –  
“That her knowing self will forever be apart from the Charter that her unknowing self is part of.”   
There, that idea again; it could mean many things, possible ideas spinning off and inspiring new ideas in their wake, but the one idea kept haunting Arielle, that Lirael was the unknowing self of the Weeper, who lived in the Charter. 

That was the idea. It was an insane idea. And more than simply being self-centered, Arielle shuddered to think of what it meant for the Charter. To force a child -- a baby -- into the role of Weeper, the Charter was far colder and less caring than she had been raised to think. It was not woven with love, but with the algebra of necessity. Whatever destiny awaited her Lirael, she must weep to meet it, weep every step of the way.  
Fresh tears sprang to Arielle’s eyes as she thought of it. She let them fall, a new idea springing to her head.: Please, please, shift some of the burden of Weeper onto me. Let my little one, my dear Lirael, be spared, even a little bit. Let mother and daughter both weep. Let us at least be united in that.   
She bowed her head, and willed her thoughts to silence.  
There was no answer.   
She heard the sounds of stirring behind her; the villagers were coming awake again.   
Arielle cupped the moonstone in her hand again. She stared into it, willing her Sight to awaken – she could almost See it –   
Lirael sleeping, her dark hair fanning all over the pillow and spilling onto her dark hair. The door to her small chamber opened, and Arielle bent over her daughter to kiss her cheek, then her ear, then her forehead, and whisper “Good morning, dear heart,” and Lirael would sit up, and gasp, and start to laugh and cry with joy and disbelief all at once, and Arielle would hug her and --   
The moonstone’s surface was empty, opaque, reflecting only the rising sun. Arielle sighed and tucked it back under her furs, before turning her back on the sea. A new day began.


End file.
